APHA Statistics Section Call For Papers

The 2000 American Public Health Association's (APHA) Annual Meeting will be held in Boston, November 12-16 with the theme "Eliminating Health Disparities". The APHA Statistics section welcomes abstracts related to advances in statistical methodology; innovative applications of statistical methodology to public health and medical problems; database development; federal and state health statistics; and statistical computing. The Statistics Section plans to have a session devoted to student papers. Professors and other members are encouraged to suggest participation by their students. Abstracts will be accepted from December 20,1999 to February 1, 2000. Submission is via an on-line system accessible through www.apha.org.

QL Volunteers Needed

The WSS sponsored Quantitative Literacy (QL) group reaches out into community to give the public, especially young people, an interest, understanding, and appreciation of statistics. We need volunteers to meet with teachers, attend career days, aid students with statistical projects, and make guest appearances in K-12th grade classes.

Classroom activities often end with "eating the data" after a statistical experiment using M&Ms, Hershey's Hugs and Kisses, or goldfish crackers (activity sheets provided). Volunteers may also use a video with excerpts from the series "Against all Odds". This comes complete with prepared questions and answers. Your own creative projects are welcome. Behind the scenes work with teachers can be a wide range of tasks from helping to plan the statistical curriculum, to soliciting interest in QL and the Curtis Jacobs Memorial Prize for Outstanding Statistics Project.

If this sounds like fun to you, please join by sending the following information:

Your name

Organization

Phone Number

Fax Number

E-mail address

Mail address

County or counties where you would prefer to volunteer. (Most volunteers chose the county where they live and/or work)

Which of the many activities that interest you:
Meeting classes
Working with teachers
Recruiting
Coordination
Other (please specify)

If you have any questions, feel free to give Wendy Rotz a call at the number below. Thank you for your interest.

SIGSTAT for January - March, 2000

SIGSTAT, the Special Interest Group in Statistics for CPCUG & WINFORMS, has resumed its monthly meetings on the 2nd Wednesday of each month. All meetings are at 12:30 in Waugh A, 1800 M St, NW. See See www.econ.ag.gov/sigstat/ for directions to the meetings and a current schedule. First time attendees should contact Charlie Hallahan at 202-694-5051 or hallahan@econ.ag.gov and leave their name for inclusion on the list left at the guard's desk.

January 12: DBMS/COPY 7.0

DBMS/COPY is a utility that translates and transfers data between over 80 different database management systems, spreadsheets, statistical analysis, Microsoft Access, ODBC and other application packages while giving the user the ability to customize the output data file. DBMS/COPY has two interfaces: DBMS/COPY Interactive and DBMS/COPY Plus. The Interactive interface can save a batch file to be executed by the Plus interface. The new version 7.0 includes support for SAS 7 and 8 datasets. Included with Version 7 are two products DBMS/Explorer and DBMS/Analyst. Explorer is an interactive, easy to use tool for the exploration and mining of data. Analyst is a powerful package for transferring data between different software programs. It contains the following modules: Crosstab generates cross tables with one or more variables; Program data manipulation module is equivalent to the SAS data step; Regress includes all possible regressions, stepwise, correlatian and collinearity; Report is the report generator; Sort; Tabulate is a sophisticated cross table generator; Transpose transposes records and variables; Unistat generates 30 different univariate statistics; and Value builds and maintains user defined formats

February 9: Stata 6.0

Stata is a complete statistical/econometric package with extensive data management capabilities and programming features, including a matrix language. Features are easily added through the programming language and many such additions are reported in the Stata Technical Bulletin, STB. It has built-in commands for panel data, time series data, survival models, count and binary data, and complex survey data. Hundreds of user-written commands are available for use with Stata and, with Stata's Internet features, obtaining these programs is easy. Bimonthly updates to Stata can easily be applied via the Internet. Stata performs very well on the NIST StRD certification tests.

March 8: SAS ODS

One of the new features introduced in SAS 7 is the Output Delivery System, ODS. With this feature the user gains access to all results calculated in a SAS PROC and can customize the appearance of the output. Output can be generated in HTML, RTF, or Postscript formats. The demo will consist of examples of applying ODS to data analysis.